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Phishing: How to Protect Against Email Attacks Sent from Compromised SendGrid Accounts

Blocking SendGrid email traffic isn't a realistic option for most businesses hit by a barrage of phishing attacks emanating from compromised accounts at the Twilio-owned email service provider in recent months. Instead, Agari leverages a strategic data modeling approach to neutralize the threat while enabling legitimate SendGrid-distributed emails to safely reach employee...
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Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) Adoption Soaring to New Heights

For a growing number of email marketers, it may be "BIMI or bust." As of June 30, nearly 5,300 companies have adopted Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI), a new email standard for showcasing a brand's logo next to its email messages in recipient inboxes, with built-in protections against phishing-based brand spoofing. The tally reflects a 3.8X increase in the...
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Why Full DMARC Protection is a Pressing Business Imperative in 2020 and Beyond

If you haven't deployed Domain-based Messaging Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC) to protect your brand from being impersonated in phishing scams, there are pressing reasons to jump on it now. Without a doubt, these are extraordinary times for individuals and organizations alike as we've been forced to change the way we work, shop, play, and live seemingly...
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Implement DMARC for Trust Before Google AMP for Email

With marketers more dependent on digital channels, many may accelerate their tests of Google's AMP for Email technology in search of an edge. But without an email protocol called Domain-based Messaging Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC), fraudsters could weaponize the trust customers expect from your brand for their own evil intentions and put consumers and...
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DMARC: How Phishing Rings Can Use Your Email Authentication Controls Against You

In the first reported case of its kind, a phishing ring in Eastern Europe is exploiting companies' own Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC) controls to impersonate CEOs in business email compromise (BEC) scams worth millions.As detailed in our new threat actor dossier on a group we call Cosmic Lynx, the Agari Cyber Intelligence Division (ACID)...
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Business Email Compromise: New Shift in BEC Threat Landscape Puts CISOs on Notice

A seismic shift in the email threat landscape has CISOs bracing for sophisticated new forms of business email compromise (BEC) scams, as phishing's center of gravity begins to tilt from West African email scammers toward Russian and Eastern European cybercrime lords. As detailed in our new threat actor dossier on a threat group we call Cosmic Lynx, the Agari Cyber Intelligence...
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Cosmic Lynx: A Russian Threat Hits the BEC Scene

“At some point, Russian and Eastern European cybercriminals are going to start thinking to themselves, ‘Why am I spending all of this time and money setting up infrastructure and hiring malware developers when I can just send someone an email, ask them to send me money, and they’ll do it.’”For more than a year, this is a line we have used over and over again, expecting that...
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Agari Summer '20 Release: CISOs Gain Unique Threat Intel to Their Organizations

With business email compromise (BEC) scams up sharply amid the coronavirus pandemic, CISOs have been forced to scour an expanding but largely inscrutable email threat landscape in hopes of fending off costly attacks—until now, that is. In an industry first, the new Agari Summer '20 Release offers CISOs access to real-world intelligence on specific phishing threats unique to...
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Phishing: With Zero-Day Email Attacks Rising, Are Some Companies Giving Up the Fight?

Amid a troubling rise in zero-day phishing attacks, recent research suggests that some companies may be making an ill-advised shift away from blocking advanced email threats to responding to them post-delivery. If true, the capitulation couldn't come at a worse time. Since January, cybercriminals taking advantage of the COVID-19 outbreak have been targeting businesses and...
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Scattered Canary Cybercrime Ring Exploits the COVID-19 Pandemic with Fraudulent Unemployment and CARES Act Claims

Recently, news broke about how a sophisticated Nigerian cybercriminal organization has been committing mass unemployment fraud against a number of states, including Florida, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Washington, and Wyoming. Based on information uncovered by the Agari Cyber Intelligence Division, some, if not all, the actors behind these fraudulent...
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BEC Gift Card Scams Move Online During COVID-19 Pandemic

With 60 million corporate employees working remotely due to the Coronavirus outbreak, cybercriminals are switching up their tactics in business email compromise (BEC) scams.In what has been called the "world's largest work-from-home experiment," organizations around the globe are being forced to quickly transition to a remote workforce, ready or not. Cybercriminals have...
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Business Email Compromise (BEC): Security Risks from your 'Out-of-Office' Reply

As if coronavirus hasn't put enough of a damper on vacation schedules this spring, corporate employees taking time off might want to rethink their "out of office" email settings for fear a different threat: Business Email Compromise (BEC) scams. Sure, the temptation to share humorous details about your big spring adventure can be irresistible for a certain species of corporate...
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Business Email Compromise (BEC) and G Suite: How the Exaggerated Lion Cybercrime Group Cashes Out

Business email compromise (BEC) has become the predominant cyber threat businesses face today. These basic social engineering scams are having a huge impact, to the tune of more than $700 million every month. To make matters worse, the recently-released Internet Crime Report from the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center shows that BEC isn’t going away any time soon, as losses...
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DMARC and Lookalike Domains: How to Protect Your Customers from Getting Duped

Hint: DMARC Alone Won't Cut It Think the prospect of cybercriminals using your domains to launch phishing attacks sounds bad for your brand? Just wait until you hear the latest on lookalike domains. Over the last few months, researchers have been discovering a troubling number of phishing sites that feature domains meant to impersonate leading brands in a variety of industries....
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Microsoft Office 365 + Secure Email Cloud: All You Need in a Cloud-First World

You’ve heard the statistics…more than 70% of all business users will be provisioned with cloud office applications in the next two years, including email. It’s an overdue modernization that eliminates physical infrastructure to drive cost savings and integrate services for improved productivity Chasing this move, cybercriminals intent on account takeover are evolving their...
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How to Prevent Phishing Attacks that Target Your Customers with DMARC and Office 365

Editor's Note: This post originally appeared on the Microsoft Security blog and has been republished here.  You already know that email is the number one attack vector for cybercriminals. But what you might not know is that without a standard email security protocol called Domain Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC), your organization is open to the...
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Ensuring DMARC Compliance for Third-Party Senders

Marketo. Salesforce. Eloqua. Bamboo HR. Zendesk. It only takes a minute to realize how much organizations love third-party senders. They are typically responsible for sending our important customer notifications, marketing promotions, prospecting emails, and even employee information.Because their mail is so important to your business, we should do what we can to help them...
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Weaponizing Accounts Receivable

Receipts and invoices—two accounting powerhouses that require little introduction. But step a little further into the world of finance and accounts, and you can quickly become a fish out of water, as the terminology to this numerical land seems to multiply exponentially.That said, in some of our recent active defense engagements with BEC cybercriminals, we have observed a new...
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From One to Many: Scattered Canary Evolves from One-Man Startup to BEC Enterprise

There is no denying that business email compromise (BEC) is big business, with losses exceeding a billion dollars in the United States in the last year alone. Globally, BEC attacks have cost more than $13 billion in the last five years. Chances are likely that you’ve probably been a recipient of one of these social-engineered emails yourself. But the question remains… who is...
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Quick, Urgent, Request: Agari Research Reveals Top Ten Subject Lines Used for BEC

You likely have a fraudulent email from a business email compromise (BEC) scammer sitting in your inbox, and you may not realize it. However, recent research from the Agari Cyber Intelligence Division (ACID) has shown that these advanced phishing attacks increasingly possess a handful of commonalities, making them easier to spot—which is good news considering their popularity...